Neighbors nix 'ghetto' tour

NEW YORK (AP) — A company that promised sightseer tours to the Bronx that included a New York City “ghetto” has stopped the bus rides under protest from an outraged neighborhood.

Real Bronx Tours, which took mostly European tourists from Manhattan to see life in the South Bronx “from a safe distance,” issued a statement this week saying it would immediately cease all tours there.

Three times a week, the ride took visitors past food-pantry lines, a housing project and a park a guide called a pickpocket hangout.

Tourists were told they’d get a look at the Bronx that reflects one of the darkest chapters of the city’s history, the 1970s and ‘80s, when the tour website said “this borough was notorious for drugs, gangs, crime and murders.”

The Bronx lost hundreds of buildings to fires intentionally set by landlords to collect insurance money.”

But residents say the tours are a misrepresentation of the area where former Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor lived in as children.